I have been saying for years that there are BUGS IN YOUR CEREAL! I have known that from experience when they ate their way out of my Fernando Valenzuela box back in 1984. Now here's proof. My local station, WVIT, has a story about a person the next town from me that opened his cereal and found live bugs. This is why I empty ALL my boxes.
Here is a reprint of newscast...
Are bugs lurking in your morning bowl of cereal?
This news made my local TV station news broadcast...
November 12, 1997 WEST HARTFORD, CT - They're low in fat and high in protein, but you definitely don't want them in your morning bowl of cereal. Touble is, experts say there's no way to keep insect eggs out of your breakfast. And, if you buy in bulk and let boxes sit before you open them, you may discover live insects like one Farmington man found in his. Out of the same box he'd eaten beofre, Ray Elling poured a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and found bugs crawling around. The bugs swimming in the milk turned his stomach. He wrote to General Mills to complain and called Connecticut News 30.
A sample of Elling's dish goes into a petri dish at the State Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven. It turns out the bugs wre sawtoothed grain beetles. Entomologist Kenneth Welch says the beetles are pantry pests that he sees on an annual basis. There is an FDA limit, not for cereal, but for wheat flour, of 75 insect fragments per fifty grams. One reason Elling found bugs is that his cereal was old, with a sell-by date of April.
No matter when you buy the cereal, experts say, insect eggs are likely to be in it and you won't know you're eating them. Bill Ullman of Northeast Labs says if a person keeps a product for any length of time what started out as an egg could develop into a worm, moth or some flying insect. There may not be anything you can do about eating the insects, but you can cut your chances of finding them if you eat the cereal by the sell-by date. If you do find bugs you should take the cereal back to the store where you bought it.
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